Dog Days Are Over: New Manga Releases

By Mat K.

If anyone has met me in the last 6 months you may be aware that I adore Florence & The Machine, and you may recognize the title of this week’s article as not just a timeless phrase, but the title of their current hit, (used in lots of movies and TV shows and commercials for such). However, that’s not really the reason for using the term as the title of this week’s anime column. The truth is the title comes from the saying “The dog days are over” which refers to the hot dreary uneventful days of summer coming to an end. The beginning of Autumn spurns the coming of school, and cooler weather, where we lose the lethargy and become busy anew. The origin of the “dog days” comes from those summer months that are ruled by Sirius (derived from the Greek for Scorcher) the dog-star which represents heat and fire. The end of the Dog Days also has a metaphorical significance, meaning that your stagnant life has come to an end, and revolution is coming. Nothing ever changes without the original form first “burning up”, like a phoenix. This concludes the educational portion of this week’s manga new article.

Now that you’ve learned something new, welcome to another full release week in September. Ironically, (for reasons I’ll leave to my older readers), this week also sees a lot of yaoi titles coming out. At the very least there are 11 yaoi titles(and a couple which may or may not be considered yaoi), many of which are coming at us from Digital Manga Publishing (as either June Press or Doki Doki). One of the biggest news releases for our yaoi titles is that June finally has the rights and releases the first book in the Finder Series: Target In The Finder, and even though this one might cost a bit more than most June books, it’s still less than when it was when it was being published by CPM. And I’m sure the fans of this series are thrilled to have it back, considering CPM went down before they had the chance to finish printing it. Also, for some reason they did manage to print the third book, but it never made wide distribution and was only available on, like, Amazon.com for an exorbitant amount of money. But I digress.